Virginia Politics: Let's 'Lock Box' This Silly Race

September 18, 2005|By BARNIE DAY

Democrats

The e-mails come in incessantly, an endless stream of them. The fax machine spits out tit-for-tat around the clock. No-plan plans, cheap tricks for sale, work the intersections like strumpets at a gullible convention.

Bob Holsworth, the erstwhile political savant at Virginia Commonwealth University, opined the other day that the whole affair seems to be high-schoolish. He was being kind. This campaign is an insult to high schoolers everywhere. But, still, think high schoolers with $25 million to spend. That buys a lot of breathlessness.

Early on, I thought -- I hoped -- the campaigns would mature through the summer -- surely by Labor Day. But I was wrong. The silly season of sign wars and accents just turned sillier. The pandering on local taxes that marked the early days seems, in retrospect, like serious, gray-templed thinking now.

There is something wrong with this picture. There is something wrong with this campaign for the governorship of Virginia.

It is a perversity that the candidate who is the longest shot -- the candidate least likely to win, the candidate with no party backing, the candidate with the least organization, the candidate with the least money, the candidate denied participation in the so-called debates has -- from the beginning -- made the most sense to a lot of people.

The state's editorial writers say as much publicly. Even some party stalwarts, Democrat and Republican -- especially those who know the realities of governing -- will privately tell you the same thing -- that H. Russell Potts, the Republican senator from Winchester running as an unaffiliated independent, does just that -- he makes the most sense -- on transportation, on education, on taxes.

Why is that?

It is because of the tone and tenor of these two campaigns -- and the lack of substance to them.

It is because we have talk of "lock boxes" as a remedy for our transportation woes, or worse, "bold" transportation plans that make cold fusion seem like a reasonable candidate for listing on the stock exchange.

It is because we have the major-party candidates belly-bumping each other over who is the mostest, bestest duck hunter -- or some such.

It is because we have a hurricane of small thinking swirling around a handful of dispossessed day laborers in Herndon.

On the gun thing: I own guns. I know guns. I hunt with guns. (Already this dove season I have limited out twice.) And I wouldn't want to get into the woods with either Tim Kaine or Jerry Kilgore, thinking they were carrying loaded ones.

Nosireebob. Not me.

On the day laborer issue, a question for you: We provide, across this commonwealth, maybe 200 comfortable, air conditioned offices wherein folks can apply for and receive welfare benefits, but when a few down-and-outers, human beings in a strange land, wrapped in a strange, strange culture, show up at a place -- not with hands out -- their callused hands -- and all they want to do is work, all they want to do is the bottom-feeding stuff we don't want to do, our studied response is to try to run them out of town -- or, as we say here in Meadows of Dan, "run 'em off."

And "lock boxes"? Why on earth would we elect somebody to do an extremely difficult job and then insist they come to work in a straight jacket and hand-cuffs? Tell me. Why would we do that?

I'll tell you what I would support. If we could somehow figure out a way to just lock up these campaigns -- to get them off the TV and out of the mailboxes, to take away their phone cards -- then I'd be all for that. And I'd say I'm in the majority on this one. I think most of Virginia would agree.

Day is a former Democratic delegate representing Patrick County. Send e-mail to bkday@swva.net. *